


Go Leor

by Chromat1cs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Adulthood, Asexual Remus Lupin, Asexuality, Bisexual Remus Lupin, Book 3: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Canon Compliant, Character Development, Demisexual remus lupin, Demisexuality, Hopeful Ending, Internal Conflict, Lie Low At Lupin's (Harry Potter), Light Angst, Loneliness, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Post-Sirius Black in Azkaban, Understanding Sirius Black, WOULD have if Remus himself hadn't stopped him, because let's be real Sirius would kill for Remus, very nearly did
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-31 20:23:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17856380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: Remus Lupin is not driven by much of what drives his peers. Thus when he finds himself alone, he must look inward and pick at the threads gnarling him up before he tangles himself too tightly to breathe.





	Go Leor

**Author's Note:**

> [Original posted here on tumblr,](https://chromat1cs.tumblr.com/post/182917035014/hii-i-love-your-writing-it-totally-pulls-me-into) edited and added a bit to make it flow more smoothly outside of drabble format.

****Remus has always supposed there are many things more important than self-indulgence.

He hardly ever feels the prickly spur of arousal so freely described by other boys at school, and when he does it’s so benign and comfortable that he’s never felt as though he needs to chase it away with hand or mouth or someone else’s body.

By year four, he at least knows the feeling of adoration. He holds Sirius and he kisses Sirius, and he’s perfectly happy with that. He knows Sirius touches himself in the showers or in the secrecy of his own bed, or sometimes even when Remus is content to lay beside him and play with Sirius’ hair and murmur tender nothings while he does it. Remus has never felt compelled to do it himself; he just likes the comfort of closeness.

Perhaps it’s a side-effect of the lycanthropy that he never wants to fuck, perhaps it’s just the way his brain is wired, _Perhaps,_ he had thought more than once against the warm press of Sirius’ mouth exploring his, _I’m just put together all wrong._

He’d voiced it once by accident in year seven and could feel Sirius’ hackles rising, invisible and sharp as though Remus might dig his fingers into the coal-spun fur dormant beneath that bone-pearl skin under Sirius’ shirt collar. “Don’t ever say that, Moony. Nothing about you is wrong.”

All it had taken was a dry look from Remus to dredge up _Wolf._ Sirius rolled his eyes and brushed it off like an insult flung messily across the Great Hall. “Shut up. ‘M not through kissing you.” And that was enough.

It was enough through the remaining scrap of school and enough through the years in the flat he shared with Sirius; enough when they felt those walls going up between the two of them as war burgeoned like rot, enough when they were too proud to spill open their hearts and rip out their veins and bare the truth to one another; enough through the distraction and the madness of grief and the aching, wracking pit of loss that rolled in all together on the burst of a Killing Curse and still lingers and bleeds on Remus like a fetid rainstorm.

It’s _almost_ enough when he tries once, three years after Hallow’s Eve and pushing his hardest to bury the instinct that’s been telling him Sirius is innocent since 198-bloody-fucking-1, to lose himself in a pretty woman with hair long and dark enough if he squints just so through the pub haze.

Remus gets eased back onto an overstuffed sofa in her sitting room and halfway through helping her slide out of her clothes before mumbling some sort of “Sorry,” hoarse and jagged along his vocal cords, flinching away as though her curves could burn.

“What are you, some sort of virgin?” She spits, affronted; Remus sees the vague hurt there in her eyes, holding her purple knit jumper in a mockery of modesty against a pretty lace brassiere that Remus can tell just by looking is very expensive. He silently tastes the sharpness of the word for a moment, _virgin,_ fricative and angular and attenuating in strange places. _Virgin._

He thinks back on the faded image of the Holy Mother above his own mother’s hearth so many years ago—her small and almost secretive smile, unlined face, open palms, perched on a crescent of sunlight. _Virgin._ Yes indeed, he’s his own open palms and crescent shapes, but how much of eternal paradise can truly be reserved for people like him? The sword cuts, he thinks, in more ways than one.

The bitter smile he finds coming to him then must seem slightly manic to the woman— _Christ, he’s already forgotten her name_ —looking askance as him while he stands up. “Barely.”

She glares at him and mutters something about _Barmy fucker_ as Remus leaves her flat, out to the street, walking for a mute and brisk borough-length before Apparating with a jolting snap.

Magic still feels strange sometimes in this quiet aftermath of catastrophe.

It’s another few years then, grey and mute and fuzzy like Muggle broadcast static, until Remus is finally teaching and finally waking up a bit. His cottage is plenty. His students are brilliant. Harry is an absolute joy, more reminiscent of James than he ever imagined possible but with all his mother’s innate skill hiding under the mischief. _Mischief;_ Remus feels brighter around his edges to think of those glittering memories despite the plague of loneliness, a hole in heart that doesn’t miss touch hardly at all but so longs for one soul in particular the he can never examine the hurt too closely for fear he’ll simply dissolve with it.

The knock on the ricketing front door is tight that evening, as if in apprehension. Remus pulls it open expecting Minerva, perhaps to share a pour of his dwindling whisky as they do once or twice week and spin the small talk of professors who have lost much of the same as they grey along similar skims of their hairlines despite their generational gap.

But there on the stoop, Sirius Black looks at once completely different and exactly as Remus’ mind had let him dare to imagine.

Remus’ breath seizes and takes Sirius’ hand without thinking, only to make sure it isn’t a ghost, and it’s cold and trembling but so solid he nearly cries right then and there.

“Needed a place to sleep. You’re all I could think of.”

Sirius’ voice creaks like rust but the desperate tenderness is raw as the iron trapped beneath it. Remus finds himself nodding before he knows it and allows him in without another word. They cross the creaking floorboards and Remus does not let himself believe the moment is real until he pushes his bedroom door to behind him with a whispering click so faint he can hardly hear it above his pulse. He watches the milky wraith of Sirius’ silhouette rimed by half-moonlight climb onto his bedcovers and curl into himself, as though he’s belonged on Remus’ bed for an age and a day—Sirius sighs a sound so thin and soft that it wriggles in between the struts of Remus’ heart, in along the hairline fractures there to fill them like caulk. Only then does Remus cede his credence to truth.

He climbs abed alongside Sirius, both of them still clothed as though merely sloppy drunk and Sirius vaguely reeking of rivers and woods and the ghosts of escape, and Remus feels the frame of his heart shuddering as he slides his arms up to cling with quiet desperation around Sirius’ shoulders and breathe him in. It’s the most he’s touched another person in ages, and it feels at once like terror and comfort to find that he only wants more of it—wants to bury himself in this skin scrawled with unfamiliar markings, dig his fingers against the bones showing faintly beneath it, choke on the whorls of long and tangled hair sprawled across the long-untouched second pillow.

It’s a visceral thing, a spangling trail of stars in his guts, and all Remus can think to do is clutch Sirius tighter as he careens through dreams likely shot through with the inky midnight of fear and freedom.

It is, he thinks to himself, enough. He presses a pale and tentative kiss to the crown of Sirius’ head and almost comes apart with the familiarity of the feeling.

It is _always_ enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I hold very dearly the hc of an ace/demi-spectrum Remus, so I hope you've enjoyed this one :>


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